How can I login to a website with Python?

Websites in general can check authorization in many different ways, but the one you’re targeting seems to make it reasonably easy for you.

All you need is to POST to the auth/login URL a form-encoded blob with the various fields you see there (forget the labels for, they’re decoration for human visitors). handle=whatever&password-clear=pwd and so on, as long as you know the values for the handle (AKA email) and password you should be fine.

Presumably that POST will redirect you to some “you’ve successfully logged in” page with a Set-Cookie header validating your session (be sure to save that cookie and send it back on further interaction along the session!).

import cookielib
import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.someserver.com/auth/login'
values = {'email-email' : '[email protected]',
          'password-clear' : 'Combination',
          'password-password' : 'mypassword' }

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
cookies = cookielib.CookieJar()

opener = urllib2.build_opener(
    urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler(),
    urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=0),
    urllib2.HTTPSHandler(debuglevel=0),
    urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookies))

response = opener.open(url, data)
the_page = response.read()
http_headers = response.info()
# The login cookies should be contained in the cookies variable

For more information visit: https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html

Typically you’ll need cookies to log into a site, which means cookielib, urllib and urllib2. Here’s a class which I wrote back when I was playing Facebook web games:

import cookielib
import urllib
import urllib2

# set these to whatever your fb account is
fb_username = "[email protected]"
fb_password = "secretpassword"

class WebGamePlayer(object):

    def __init__(self, login, password):
        """ Start up... """
        self.login = login
        self.password = password

        self.cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
        self.opener = urllib2.build_opener(
            urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler(),
            urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=0),
            urllib2.HTTPSHandler(debuglevel=0),
            urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(self.cj)
        )
        self.opener.addheaders = [
            ('User-agent', ('Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; '
                           'Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)'))
        ]

        # need this twice - once to set cookies, once to log in...
        self.loginToFacebook()
        self.loginToFacebook()

    def loginToFacebook(self):
        """
        Handle login. This should populate our cookie jar.
        """
        login_data = urllib.urlencode({
            'email' : self.login,
            'pass' : self.password,
        })
        response = self.opener.open("https://login.facebook.com/login.php", login_data)
        return ''.join(response.readlines())

You won’t necessarily need the HTTPS or Redirect handlers, but they don’t hurt, and it makes the opener much more robust. You also might not need cookies, but it’s hard to tell just from the form that you’ve posted. I suspect that you might, purely from the ‘Remember me’ input that’s been commented out.

For HTTP things, the current choice should be: Requests- HTTP for Humans

Let me try to make it simple, suppose URL of the site is www.example.com and you need to sign up by filling username and password, so we go to the login page say http://www.example.com/login.php now and view it’s source code and search for the action URL it will be in form tag something like

 <form name="loginform" method="post" action="userinfo.php">

now take userinfo.php to make absolute URL which will be ‘http://example.com/userinfo.php‘, now run a simple python script

import requests
url = 'http://example.com/userinfo.php'
values = {'username': 'user',
          'password': 'pass'}

r = requests.post(url, data=values)
print r.content

I Hope that this helps someone somewhere someday.

Web page automation ? Definitely "webbot"

webbot even works web pages which have dynamically changing id and classnames and has more methods and features than selenium or mechanize.

Here’s a snippet 🙂

from webbot import Browser 
web = Browser()
web.go_to('google.com') 
web.click('Sign in')
web.type('[email protected]' , into='Email')
web.click('NEXT' , tag='span')
web.type('mypassword' , into='Password' , id='passwordFieldId') # specific selection
web.click('NEXT' , tag='span') # you are logged in ^_^

The docs are also pretty straight forward and simple to use : https://webbot.readthedocs.io